Will Mozilla deliver on time after many times where they were late?

Surprisingly, the Mozilla corporation will actually be in the position to release the highly anticipated, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4. This new update will most likely be the last of its kind until the real big browser comes into play, Firefox 3.5.

This came as a big thrill to me as you all have realised over the last few beta releases, they have been remarkably late! To refresh your memory,they stopped Beta 3 being released, not just once but twice and then moving on to Beta 4. In additon, the fact that they got rid of Firefox 3.0 demonstrating how amazingly different the two versions, 3.0 and 3.5 actually are.

Why were there always delays?

The obvious reason for the delays are the time management issues, that they did not stick to their target plan. However, the most important reason was from TraceMonkey, which is the new Javascript engine established by Firefox. This seems to be vital for Firefox as it is supposedly meant make pages load 2 times quicker and 9 times quicker than Firefox 3.0

Though, do not get too complacent as Beta 4 still has seven high-priority bugs, which needs to be fixed pretty pronto especially as 5 of the issues are concerning the newly installed, highly problematic javascript engine.

What is to be expected from Firefox 3.5? Well it will give a number of new features regarding HTML 5, the widely used grammer of the Web nowadays. It will give lots of security and a better performance giving a good online experience. There are many other features that I shall outline below,

- Audio and video elements that free media from being dependent on plug-ins, and give Web developers greater control over how media will appear on a Web page

- Easy to drag and drop elements when using Websites

- Isolated browsing feature that stops Firefox from recording your Web activities similar to the heavily used, Google Incognito Window.

- One-click deletion for specific Websites: similar to private browsing, right clicking and selecting “forget about this” for any Website in Firefox’s Web history will delete all history records relating to that Website.

- Wi-Fi based geolocation (opt-in feature)

-Awesome fonts you can download to make your experience online even better.

Mozilla, I feel are still working very hard on both Firefox 3.5 and 3.o. We can see they are working extremely hard as firstly, in the last couple of weeks they unveiled Firefox 3.0.9 update containing twelve security problem fixes, apparently four, if not repaired, could ruin Mozilla. This has been the biggest piece of security fixing since 2008 demonstrating the work they have done, bearing in mind this is the second fix in just under a month. Finally, late last month, Mozilla unveiled a solution for ‘zero day’ flaw after a German computer hacker successfully breached the browser and so won the various competitions posed, meaning he won a nice prize of $15000.

In conclusion, I think lately Mozilla have excited users when displaying all these new and improved features, pleasing all the users, including me. Keep going Mozilla and keep up the good work but do not disappoint in the release dates as it can be their biggest downfall.